Special characters converted to question marks on save

I’ve recently migrated from WordPress.com to my own host provider. On WordPress.com I could type, save and store simplified Chinese characters with no issues. My new install of WP replaces each Chinese character with a question mark.

I edited wp-config.php and commented out these lines as advised:

/*define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);*/

Now I can save and display simplified Chinese characters along with my English. Thanks very much.

After my change of the wp-config.php I can input, display and save simplified Chinese characters.

However a side effect of this change is that my RSS now gives an error and outside RSS aggregators cannot read the feed. I get the following error from my “Dashboard”, “WordPress Development Blog” window:

Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in /home/dontaico/public_html/wp/wp-includes/rss.php on line 449

* An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

As a result I uncommented the two lines of my wp-config.php. The RSS problems has been resolved but I still cannot display Chinese characters. Therefore this problem, for me, is still unresolved.

I’ve been doing some testing with the encoding when declaring it etc..

So far I’ve discovered that, if you change:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

To:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'UTF-8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

The encodings of tags are saved when you add them after changing your wp_config.php’s encoding. However, any encoding that you try to make in posts will cease to exist, even if you are trying post after changing the value to UTF-8.

However, if you change the values to utf8, my posts all show up the chinese characters and what not, except the tags are no longer appearing correctly.

After further testing, I was mistaken about my above post. The thing is I have both vietnamese and chinese characters on my page, so I had to add in another windows character encoding into my web browser (FF) in order for both to show up. So right now both character languages show up with the following settings:

/*define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');*/

For the following browsers:

Firefox (Activate encodings via View -> Character encoding -> Customize list -> )
– Add in Vietnamese (Window-1258)
– Add in Unicode (UTF-8)

Internet Explorer (View -> Encoding -> )
– Set encoding of browser to Unicode (UTF-8)

Hopefully that helps someone out there.

I had the same problem when I installed WordPress with Fantastico. I wanted to have a tri-lingual site: English and Biblical Greek and Hebrew. When I posted I got the ????? when rendered from a browser.

The problem was that by using CPanel Fantastico, the tables were created with Latin1_Swedish collation. I solved the problem by using PHPMyAdmin to delete all the tables in the database. I then used the regular installation script “../wp-admin/install.php”. The readme.html file in the installation directory is very helpful.

Problem solved. I can now use English, Biblical Hebrew, and Polytonic Greek.

I’m stuck. I’m trying to move my wordpress installation to a new server. My current server is MySQL 4.0 and the data in the wp_posts table include characters like ??? and ??ú for curly quotes, etc. They display properly on this site.

When i transfer the data to the new server, running MySQL 5, the collation for the database is clearly defined as utf8_general_ci (whereas it is not apparent on the 4.0 database what collation is used), and the characters display improperly (e.g. firm???s). I have not changed the varibles on the wp-config.php file (DB_CHARSET/DB_ENCODING), but when I comment them out, the characters display as question marks (e.g. firm???s).

I’m stuck on this. I’ve tried running the UTF8 Sanitizer as well as UTF-8 Database converter to no avail.

help!

I confirm that the solution to avoid the ???? characters provided in the last message of SCEPTREOFJUDAH is the best one, if your site was installed with fantastico.
The database tables created by fantastico are not utf8_general_ci. However, if you have already entered many posts to the dbase, you don’t need to reinstall it, you can just edit the database table and set the collation to utf8_general_ci.
Here’s an example of how to do it using phpMyAdmin that most Cpanel/fantastico users should have.

Cheers
Collation editing within phpMyAdmin

redtomaka, thanks for the link, but my phpMyAdmin won’t let me adjust those values, i.e. it just gives me a text (latin1_swedish_ci) and not the dropdown menu. Is there something I need to adjust for it to work?